[Ndn-interest] First release of the micro-forwarder browser extension

[Wentao Shang]

Hi team,

During the 2nd NDN Hackathon at UCSD last month, a small team of developers
including Jeff Thompson, Muktadir Chowdhury and me worked on a project that
uses NDN-JS library to develop a micro NDN forwarder as a browser
extension.  We were able to run the JavaScript-based ChronoChat app in two
tabs inside the same browser and seamlessly communicate with each other
through the browser extension, without any dependency on external NFD
service.  We demonstrated the result at the end of the Hackathon and won
the Best External Impact award (see http://2nd-ndn-hackathon.named-data.net/
).

After the Hackathon we continued to improve the browser extension to make
it more user-friendly.  Now we are pleased to announce the first release of
the extension to the public community.  Here is a list of features we
currently provide:

1/ Cross-browser support: the same code runs in both Firefox (45.0+) and
Chrome, and we provide signed extension package for both browsers;

2/ Ability to connect to external NDN forwarder: the browser extension can
establish WebSocket connections to external NFD, and the connections will
be shared by all the tabs inside the browser;

3/ Simple configuration page for the extension: the user can add more
routes to external NFDs and show current micro forwarder status on the
config page;

NDN-JS is by far the most popular client library for the developers in the
NDN community.  We believe the new micro-forwarder extension will provide
stronger NDN support for browser platforms and enable more creative Web
applications powered by the NDN protocol.

The source code of the extension is part of the NDN-JS codebase and can be
found at
https://github.com/named-data/ndn-js/tree/master/tools/micro-forwarder.
Link to the Firefox Add-on package:
https://github.com/named-data/ndn-js/raw/master/tools/micro-forwarder/ndn-micro-forwarder.xpi
.
Link to the Chrome extension package:
https://github.com/named-data/ndn-js/raw/master/tools/micro-forwarder/extension.crx
.
Any feedback/bug report is welcome.

Best,
Wentao

-- 
PhD @ IRL, CSD, UCLA
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